A LOST MAP ON THE TRAMWAY IN ISTANBUL
ianyan Magazine
Dec 4 2012
“Who are you? This is Turkey. Do you know what Turkey is?” a man asked
me, his thick glasses magnifying the fear in his eyes. He belonged
to the little-known Armenian Gypsy community, in the KurtuluÅ~_
district of Istanbul. I was at a teahouse where Armenian Gypsy men
usually gathered, trying to interview them.
And he was right. I didn’t know what Turkey is. But Turkey, and many
Armenians themselves, didn’t know who he was either.
In Turkey, there lives a mysterious minority known as the “secret
Armenians.” They have been hiding in the open for nearly a century.
Outwardly, they are Turks or Kurds, but the secret Armenians are
actually descendants of the survivors of the 1915 Genocide, who stayed
behind in Eastern Anatolia after forcibly converting to Islam. Some
are now devout Muslims, others are Alevis -generally considered
an offshoot of Shia Islam, even though that would be an inaccurate
description by some accounts-, and a few secretly remain Christian,
especially in the area of Sassoun, where still there are mountain
villages with secret Armenian populations. Even though Armenian
Gypsies wouldn’t strictly qualify as Secret Armenians, they share
many traits with the latter, including reluctance or fear to reveal
their identity even to fellow Armenians.
No one knows whether the secret Armenians are in the thousands or
the few million. For the most part, they fear coming out. “Turkey
is still a dangerous place for Armenians,” one secret Armenian woman
from Palu told me.
The secret Armenians do not mingle with the other, “open” Armenians,
of the active but dwindling community in Istanbul. Most don’t talk
to strangers. Breaking taboos in Turkey can be deadly. After all,
they remember what happened to Hrant Dink. Dink, an Armenian-Turkish
journalist, was shot dead in Istanbul in 2007 by a young man, enraged
by his unforgiving pen on controversial issues ranging from the
Armenian Genocide to modern Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk.
It is not easy to define who is a secret Armenian. Some refuse to be
called Armenian, even though they admit their parents or grandparents
were so, but sometimes, often against their own will, they are still
considered Armenian by other Turks or Kurds, unconvinced about their
conversion. Some are known to be Armenian to their neighbors and don’t
hide it, while others keep it even from their own children, some of
whom find out from other kids, who taunt them for being Armenian.
Rafael Altıncı, the last Armenian in Amasya, was raised a Christian
and for one year studied in Istanbul at the Uskudar Surp Hac Armenian
High School, where Hrant Dink was also a student at the time. For
all practical purposes however, he’s a Muslim and is married to a
Turkish woman, with whom he has had a daughter raised as a Turk. Still,
he considers himself an Armenian.
In the mountains of Mush, Jazo Uzal is the last Armenian in the
Armenian village of Nish, four hours of tortuous drive from Bitlis.
Mr. Uzal remains a practicing Christian, spending the winters in
Istanbul, but back in the village he observes the Muslim feasts,
including the Ramadan.
For his part, Mehmet Arkan, a lawyer in Diyarbakir, didn’t know his
family was Armenian until he got into a fight with a Kurdish kid when
was 7 years old and came back home crying, saying he had been called
“Armenian.” He soon found out from his father that they were indeed
Armenian, though telling anyone outside home was strictly forbidden.
“Ten years ago we would not admit it, but now it’s no longer unsafe
in Diyarbakir,” he said in an interview, as the local government
is embracing its Armenian past, recently restoring the St. Giragos
Church and instituting a course in Armenian for beginners. Mr. Arkan
feels no less Armenian for being an observant Sunni Muslim.
As my trip in search of secret Armenians was drawing to a close last
summer, I experienced a final incident that shed new light on the
characters that play out the drama of Turkey every day, a reminder
that we are all actors trapped in the plot of history, playing roles
most of us haven’t chosen.
I was heading to the Istanbul Airport, where my flight to New York
awaited me. I took the metro, and I got off at Lâleli Station for my
transfer. After a ten-minute walk, I learned that I had disembarked
at the wrong station. Then, trying not to panic, I also realized that
I had left a four-foot tube on the tram, wrapped in old newspapers,
containing valuable and potentially troublesome material: a map of
Tunceli, a rebellious province, with the name “TURKÄ°YE” torn off.
Inside the cylindrical tube, I had also placed compromising notes
written in Turkish of an interview with a Zaza activist. (Zazas are a
branch of the Kurdish people who are in the majority in Tunceli.) But
what I really wanted was what I had rolled inside the map: four
precious, autographed photos by Armenian-Turkish photo-reporter
Ara Guler.
I debated whether I should try to recover the tube. I knew that should
anyone unwrap the map, the contents could get me into trouble with the
police. I was also aware of how slim the chances were of getting back
an item lost in the mass transit system of a city of 13 million people.
The map of Tunceli had been given to me by the Zaza activist, who had
torn off the name of Turkey from it -fragments from the E in “TURKÄ°YE”
were still visible at the bottom of the map, looking like stripes of
a tattered flag. The name of Tunceli had been angrily crossed out
in thick, black sharpie, and atop it the activist had written the
province’s old name, Dersim. “Dersim is not Turkey,” the activist said.
Turks mention “Dersim” and “1938” in the same breath, the way people
elsewhere speak of the Olympic Games. Nineteen thirty-eight was the
year of a massacre by Turkish military forces sent to suppress an
uprising. Although Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had recently
apologized for the massacre, calling it “the biggest tragedy in our
history,” the name “Dersim” still has subversive resonances. Any
Turkish police officer looking at the defaced map would have
no difficulty getting the point. And it would easily pass for an
“insult to the Turkish nation,” as defined in Article 301 of the
Turkish Penal Code, punishable by up to three years in prison.
But that was small beer compared to what the notes revealed. During
an interview conducted in a building facing the Turkish military base
in Dersim, this Zaza activist had told me, as recorded in the notes:
“You are Armenian. This land has been waiting for you. Come and claim
back your land. Get a gun, and go to the mountains to fight. If your
wife doesn’t join you, we’ll get you one of our women, and she’ll
fight alongside you.”
Dersim probably has the highest concentration of secret Armenians,
a topic that obsessed Hrant Dink, who claimed that there are about 2
million of them in Turkey. And, in a way, Dersim and secret Armenians
are connected to Dink’s murder.
In an article published in his newspaper Agos, Dink claimed Sabiha
Gökcen, the first female combat pilot in both Turkey and the world,
and Ataturk’s adoptive daughter, was an Armenian orphan from the 1915
genocide, Khatun Sebilciyan.
Thus, she was a secret Armenian. Gökcen is considered a Turkish hero,
in no small part due to her role in suppressing the Dersim uprising
in 1938, strafing rebel positions at close range. Dink was murdered
in the furious aftermath that followed his story on Gökcen’s alleged
Armenian origin and the tragic irony of an Armenian genocide orphan,
with the identity of a Turk, taking part in a massacre of Kurds,
only two decades after the Genocide.
Back at the tramway station in Istanbul, I went to see the
stationmaster to report the lost map. A polite, solemn young man,
he spoke with a thick Eastern Anatolian accent, his K’s turning into
“Kh’s.”
After taking my report, the stationmaster invited me for tea. Someone
dropped by to greet him. The station master’s friend wanted to know
where I was from. “Argentina,” I replied, but he wasn’t buying any of
it and kept pressing me about my origins. Why did I speak Turkish? Why
did I look “almost like a Turk?” I insisted that I am Argentine. “Yes,
of course, I’m Japanese,” he said with a sour smile. “You loved
Turkey, didn’t you?” he asked me and walked away without waiting for my
reply. As I watched him leave, I remembered that a few months earlier,
Argentina had received unflattering coverage in the Turkish press over
formally recognizing the Armenian Genocide. Many Turks are aware of
Argentina’s sizable Armenian community.
A few minutes later, a young man in sunglasses, a black T- shirt, and
trousers, flashed a police badge and passed through the turnstile. He
reminded me of a similarly dressed plainclothes agent who had given
me trouble in Dersim, after I walked out of the building where the
Zaza activist had given me the map. The man did not approach me.
Then, the telephone rang inside the supervisor’s booth. “They found the
map,” he said stoically, staring at me through his dark sunglasses. “It
will be here in fifteen minutes.” I began to steel myself for a trip
to the police station.
Indeed, the tram pulled over fifteen minutes later. The driver quickly
stepped outside and handed the tube with the map to the stationmaster.
The stationmaster walked up to me, shook my hand, and wished me a
safe trip home -“wherever that is,” he said. He returned the tube with
the map to me unopened, the old Hurriyet newspapers rolled along the
outer side, with a photograph of Prime Minister Erdogan sporting an
angry expression and wagging his finger at God knows what.
Avedis Hadjian is a writer based in New York. He has published in the
Los Angeles Times, CNN, Bloomberg News and other newspapers and news
sites. This article is an excerpt from his book “A Secret Nation:
The Hidden Armenians of Turkey,” due in fall 2013
http://www.ianyanmag.com/2012/12/04/a-lost-map-on-the-tramway-in-istanbul/